Spielberg and the Eleven Million

Irmin

In an episode of Steven Spielberg's
miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) American soldiers, the men of
Easy Company, stumble upon a German concentration camp, a satellite of
Dachau, where to their horror they discover hundreds of emaciated Jews,
along with about an equal number of Jewish corpses. It is the spring of
1945 and we are -- or so Spielberg would have us believe -- in the midst
of an extermination facility, one part of the vast industrialized machinery
of mass murder designed to effect the nazi Final Solution, the physical
extermination of the Jewish people. All of the inmates in the camp are
thus Jews, identified by the yellow stars stitched into their striped camp
uniforms, and they identify themselves as Jews to the startled liberators.

That was Spielberg's first inaccuracy,
which we shall call Falsehood #1. Most of the inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald,
about eighty percent, were non-Jews. When we look at photographs of liberated
German concentration camps, we now think that all of the "survivors" we
see are Jews. But that, as a matter of uncontested fact, is untrue. In
1945 American media coverage of the liberation of the camps on German soil
rarely spoke of Jews, for the simple reason that Jews were a minority among
their various inmates. The Americans who liberated the camps did not "confront
the (Jewish) Holocaust," as Spielberg's Band of Brothers wants us
to assume. They instead discovered, as a contemporary British documentary
put it, "men of every European nationality, including ... Germans."

Liberation
of Dachau, 29 April 1945: In photographs of concentration camps we now
see
Jews, but in fact the men above are Poles.

Falsehood #1 -- the ejection of
Gentiles from Dachau and their replacement with Jews -- generates a problem
for Spielberg. If all of the inmates in the concentration camp presented
in Band of Brothers are Jews, and if Hitler wanted to exterminate
all Jews, then why are the inmates still alive? That is also, of course,
the monumental problem that the Jewish Holocaust has always faced. Why
did the Germans fail to kill all the Jews under their control? Why did
they bother to evacuate Jewish internees from the East? Why is Elie Wiesel,
evacuated in 1945 from Auschwitz in Poland to Buchenwald in Germany, still
alive? Why was Anne Frank not gassed at Auschwitz? Why was she instead
relocated to Bergen-Belsen, where she tragically succumbed to typhus?

By falsely making all of his camp's
inmates Jews, Spielberg faces the same problem, and he invents a solution
-- Falsehood #2. The camp guards, a Jewish survivor tells Spielberg's American
liberators, desperately shot as many of the inmates as they could, knowing
that the imminent arrival of Allied liberators would end their genocidal
mission. Then they ran out of ammunition. So they fled, no doubt disappointed
at their failure to implement fully their part of the Final Solution to
the Jewish Question. They had killed as many Jews as they were able to
kill, but not as many Jews as they had wanted to kill (i.e. all of them,
every single person in the camp). The emaciated Jews we see on the screen
are still alive because the nazi killers fortuitously ran out of bullets.

Even for most mainstream Holocaust
scholarship, the presence of survivors at Dachau poses no insurmountable
problem, since the bulk of the inmates interned there were not Jewish.
We should keep that significant yet often overlooked fact in mind: In 1945
none of the American liberators of German concentration camps believed
that they had uncovered the physical machinery of a plan to murder all
Jews, because the majority by far of the inmates they liberated were Gentiles.
A mainstream historian today can account for living men and women in Dachau
even if he accepts the proposition that NS Germany planned the extermination
of all Jews. A revisionist historian, who denies that NS Germany planned
the extermination of all Jews, can also (and much more plausibly) account
for Jewish survivors in the German camps: Hitler did not attempt to murder
every Jew on the face of the planet, and the survival of the twenty percent
of the inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald who were indeed Jewish proves it.
If Hitler had wanted them dead, and if exterminating Jews was the central
motive of his political career, they all would have been killed long before
the Allies arrived. The Jewish survivors in the various camps therefore
prove the revisionist thesis.

Falsehood #1, which amounts to
the judaizing of Dachau, is necessary for Spielberg, because it preserves
the concentration camp as distinctively Jewish symbolic territory. Spielberg,
who rediscovered his Jewishness after studying the Holocaust, has no intention
of commemorating German crimes by depicting non-Jews as the majority of
the victims. He wants to retain the potently Jewish symbolism of a concentration
camp, established in public consciousness by hundreds of Holocaust films
and Holocaust memorials, and he is willing to ignore factual history to
achieve his political aims. Falsehood #2 -- the claim that Germans tried
to exterminate Dachau's inmates -- is also necessary for Spielberg, because
without it the death camp presented on our television screens would be
reduced to an internment camp or even to a mere prison, ceasing to appear
as a site for genocide. A nazi concentration camp not dedicated to genocidal
mass killing would be a contradiction in terms.

We are thus prepared for Falsehood
#3, which is the ideological culmination of the others. A final notice,
which brings this episode of Band of Brothers to its conclusion,
reads: "During the following months, Allied Forces discovered numerous
POW, concentration, and death camps. These camps were part of the Nazi
attempt to effect the 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Question'. Between
1942 and 1945 five million ethnic minorities and six million Jews were
murdered -- many of them in the camps."

Falsehood #3 -- the "five million
ethnic minorities" -- is more complex than its two predecessors and requires
a longer explanation.

In popular memory the Holocaust
is the extermination of Six Million Jews. Any man on the street asked to
put a numerical figure to the Holocaust's victims will have a simple answer:
Six Million. Yet at a more official level the Holocaust is really the extermination
of Eleven Million: Six Million Jews plus five million "others," even though
those "others" are generally absent from the Holocaust's public representations.
Many Holocaust museums, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
in Washington, are officially dedicated to the Eleven Million. Unsurprisingly
the Jews running the USHMM have blithely ignored an explicit mandate to
that effect, secure in the knowledge that no politician would dare complain
that the Museum is too Jewish and should diversify itself by sharing almost
half its space with five million dead Gentiles. In theory, however, about
half of the Holocaust is non-Jewish, and if the Holocaust were an affirmative-action
employer, about half of all the Holocaust films and Holocaust museums and
Holocaust educational programs would be devoted to non-Jews.

In Band of Brothers Spielberg
elects, as an act of multicultural inclusion, to present the Holocaust
as the extermination of the Eleven Million, not simply of the Six Million,
because he wants to construct Dachau as an unmistakable embodiment of "racism."
He wants us to believe that Germans murdered, in camps like Dachau and
elsewhere, Six Million Jews and five million other minorities as part of
their deranged racial vision of the world, which required the physical
extermination of various non-optimal racial types, not only Jews. The liberation
episode in Band of Brothers is thus appropriately entitled "Why
We Fight," indicating that the Americans who liberated the camps belatedly
discovered an "anti-racist" justification for World War II in their horrific
"confrontation with the Holocaust." A White American in 1940 might not
have known what "racism" could lead to -- he might even have been a "racist"
himself -- but after he saw "racism" concretized in the camps in 1945,
he knew what he had been unwittingly fighting to prevent. That, at any
rate, is the lesson Spielberg hopes we will learn.

This formally inclusive anti-racism
also provides an official rationale for the presence of the USHMM on the
Mall in Washington, at the symbolic heart of American nationhood: "This
museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic
civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide."
The Eleven Million are a more ecumenical and democratic statement of anti-racism
than the Six Million, and they imply that not only Jews have a stake in
the institutionalized commemoration of Jewish deaths. The five million
others are always dispensible, but they are, despite their virtual absence
from public view, structurally useful to the Holocaust when it provides
anti-racist lessons to multiracial America, because they prove that Holocaust
commemoration is not simply a self-serving warning against the evils of
anti-Semitism. If you think of yourself as a racial or an ethnic minority,
then you too are included in the Holocaust, even though you may find yourself
relegated to a few footnotes or (as in this case) to a single line at the
conclusion of a television program that has otherwise deliberately excluded
you.

Spielberg could have accomplished
his educational objective by eliminating Falsehood #1 while retaining Falsehood
#2. In other words, he could have visibly embodied the Eleven Million in
a throng of emaciated European "ethnic minorities" milling about the camp
awaiting liberation, with a few Jews wearing yellow stars sprinkled among
them. Falsehood #2 could have been spoken by (say) a Pole or a Serb,
a non-Jewish minority, a member of one of the ethnic groups whose victims
(allegedly) comprise the five million. Although Polish Holocaust survivors
in speaking roles are likely too WASPish for the purposes of contemporary
anti-racism, and although Jews hate Poles even more than they hate Germans,
their visible presence would be a reasonable concession to the historical
fact that most of the inmates at Dachau were Gentiles, many of them Poles
and Catholics. Band of Brothers
would have remained, even with this
gesture to multiethnic inclusion, an ideologically driven fiction, still
falsely presenting Dachau as a place where Germans warehoused minorities
whom they planned (when time and available ammunition permitted) to murder;
yet it would have been spared the burden of one theoretically unnecessary
lie, the lie that Dachau was filled with Jews.

Spielberg is not, however, interested
in anti-racism alone, so the lie was politically imperative. He, like most
Holocaust promoters, has little interest in generic anti-racism. He prefers
a special kind of anti-racism, a Judeocentric anti-racism wherein his Jewish
minority can stand for other minorities, whose literal presence then becomes
optional. The Holocaust can be reduced to the Six Million in most public
presentations, or enlarged (for the sake of multicultural inclusion) into
the Eleven Million whenever Jews think it expedient. Jews have successfully
figured Jewish Holocaust survivors and Jewish Holocaust deaths into synecdoches
for the results of "racism," one part standing for the rest, so that other
victims become semantically superfluous and need not be exhibited. It is
a politically valuable symbolic structure that no activist Jew would willingly
endanger, and hordes of White Holocaust survivors in a didactic version
of Dachau are thus unthinkable.

A Symbolic
Genocide

The Holocaust has
increasingly become, for the democratic world at least, a symbol of all
the other Genocides, for racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of foreigners, ethnic
cleansing, and mass destruction of humans by humans generally. The reason
for this is, possibly, that a vague realization is taking hold of people
that the Holocaust, the planned total annihilation of the Jewish people
at the hands of the Nazi regime, is both a Genocide like other Genocides,
and also an unprecedented event in human history, which should serve as
a warning to all of us.

-- Prof. Yehuda Bauer,
Yad Vashem

This flexible structure has important
practical consequences. A student being indoctrinated into the truths of
multiracialism can learn his anti-racist lessons while contemplating only
the Six Million, which is the normal educational practice in most Holocaust
museums. "Because of its Jewish specificity," Yad Vashem's Avner Shalev
argues, "[the Holocaust] should serve as a model in the global fight against
the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred and genocide." Jewish
specificity is somehow equivalent to human universality, so through the
symbolic magic of the Holocaust we can commemorate crimes against any given
minority by commemorating German crimes against Jews. If a Euro-American
wants to rid himself of "racism" and learn tolerance for Blacks, he need
only study German atrocities against Jehovah's Chosen People, whose victims
during the Holocaust serve, in the words of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, as
"delegates to our memory of all the victims of history." As the result
of a process purportedly involving nothing extrinsic to the events of the
Holocaust, nothing so vulgar as Jewish media power, Jewish Holocaust victims
have come to signify all other racial victims from time immemorial down
to the present. Spielberg therefore presents the Eleven Million while dispensing
with all visible evidence of any victims other than Jewish victims, a prerogative
that the Holocaust entitles him to exercise. Indeed he gains the best of
both worlds: He explicitly states the Eleven Million, signaling multicultural
inclusion, while eradicating all Gentile camp inmates from the screen.
His wildly unhistorical version of Dachau is an exact duplication of the
ideological structure of an anti-racist Holocaust museum: Jewish victims
stand for all other victims.

Yet in fact -- and here we enter
into the strange complexity of the Eleven Million -- Spielberg's multicultural
deference to the five million others, Falsehood #3, is more historically
inaccurate than his racial devotion to the Six Million Jews. For the Eleven
Million are bogus, pure fantasy. If the five million others who form the
Holocaust's Gentile Auxiliary include all Allied civilians who died during
the course of the war, the figure is far too low; if it means (as Spielberg
intends) targeted ethnic minorities who perished in German concentration
camps, it is far too high. (See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American
Life [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999], 215-216.)

Although
revisionists seek to reduce the Six Million to some smaller number, it
remains a genuine result of mainstream scholarship, whether it is true
or not. No revisionist, furthermore, denies that millions of Jews were
killed by Germans or died in German concentration camps. The five million,
on the other hand, are completely fictional and no Holocaust scholarship
could ever account for their official recognition as co-victims with the
Six. They were conjured up, on the basis of political expediency alone,
by nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in order to provide an emotional reason
for non-Jews to commemorate the Holocaust, while retaining preeminent Jewish
victimhood. Five million dead Gentiles are simply one million victims fewer
than Six Million dead Jews, and that elementary arithmetic is literally
the source of the Eleven Million victims that the Holocaust is officially
supposed to commemorate, an obligation honored more in the breach than
the observance. So by paying occasional lip service to the five million,
Jews are falsifying history; by regularly ignoring them, they are unintentionally
respecting the historical record. [Image: Simon Wiesenthal, inventor of
the Eleven Million.]

Since most Americans have probably
never heard of the five million, who constitute only a small part of the
Holocaust's public mythology, we should not exaggerate their political
significance. It is, however, worth noting the symbolic instability of
this five million. Insofar as the five million are Gentiles they are us,
our stake in the Jewish Holocaust, invented as a motive for our commemoration;
insofar as they are "ethnic minorities" they are Other, not us,
essentially surrogates for rainbow-coalition minorities, who can thereby
be transported back into wartime history to teach anti-racist lessons.
In the five million we are supposed not only to see ourselves but also
to see the potential victims our of "racism," our reason for avoiding nazi-like
racial self-assertion. A nonracialized interpretation of the five million
would be useless for Holocaust lessons in racial tolerance; a five million
comprised of powerless "ethnic minorities" provides an appropriate supplement
to Judeocentric anti-racism.

Tens of millions of European deaths
occurred in World War II, together with an incalculable number of casualties.
Through Holocaust arithmetic they have all dwindled into one million less
than Six Million, reduced to a symbolically ambiguous cohort of token Gentiles
that Jews rarely even deign to exploit.

For a
revisionist overview of the camps see Liberation of
the Camps; for an overview of Dachau see (off-site) Lessons
from Dachau, which documents the large contingent of Communists and
criminals interned there. David Irving's website
has some Dachau links
and a page devoted to the US Atrocity
at Dachau. We should not, however, be surprised that after history's
most brutal war American soldiers had learned to hate their German enemies.
For more on Simon Wiesenthal, see Mark Weber's article.